The myth of the indispensable man does real damage.
The release of private info was not incompetence. It was deliberate malice or negligent malice. Probably the former.
The graveyards are full of indispensable men.
I used to read that de Gaulle line as "We will persevere!" but in my old age, I'm reading it as "we are always already fucked."
Anyway, that USC dean has to the highest-functioning drug addict in the world.
Seriously. I didn't see anything in the article that implied he wasn't doing his job adequately. It is hard to believe that is the case, because he was spending hours a day elsewhere, doing drugs, but the LA Times article doesn't list any complaints from the med school about inadequate job performance.
It does seem like this guy was living Halfordismo.
I don't think he's the first guy to use meth to work long hours while still having time to party.
Huh, interesting. I assumed it was bad work behavior as part of all the other stuff, but you're right, it's not strictly there in the article; and a lot of his job is schmoozing rich people at functions so you could imagine success being compatible with nothing-like-regular hours.
However, just in terms of patterns, when top bosses are called this amazing and essential, that is often used to excuse a multitude of sins. In particular, the article mentions multiple investigations for sexual harassment at his previous job as well as a (non-sexual) assault allegation which was settled. And a sexagenarian keeping a long-term druggy-party companionship with a 20-year-old woman also seems like a warning sign of him leaning on his power/money in ways that could easily carry over to the workplace.
5: Title probably still (posthumously) held by Paul Erdős.
Oh, and of course the implications of his apparent ability to bury any investigation into the overdose and if anyone bore culpability.
I used to read that de Gaulle line as "We will persevere!" but in my old age, I'm reading it as "we are always already fucked."
I've always thought of it as a cross between "we will persevere" and "most people are not as indispensable as they believe that they are."
12:2 I think it's mostly the latter. Here's a use of the quote to comment on Steve Jobs taking medical leave from Apple. More references, including sources attributing the quote to Georges Clemenceau, Sardar Patel, and Rivarol as well as de Gaulle.
The graveyards are full of people who might have coined the saying "The graveyards are full of indispensable men."
cf the Coop Bank's former meth addict chairman, though I don't think there's any danger of his performance being labelled adequate.
I bet his meth was made in only the bathrooms of the finest Walmarts.
A new Manhattan Project, but to develop fun recreational drugs that are hard to abuse. Long-term, it should be drug glands of course.
"most people are not as indispensable as they believe that they are."
This is how I read it.
In other misunderstood phrases, I thought for the longest time 'United we stand, divided we fall' was about the futility of working together. Like sure, we'll work together when we're alive but once we start dying, you're on your own.
Auden in '1939' changed the final line from "we must love one another or die' to 'we must love one another and die' which is quite a shift.
Realistic, certainly. It's not as if there's a way around it.
ONLY WITH YOUR ASSIGNED BREEDING PARTNER, CITIZEN. TAKE YOUR EMOTO-STABILISER PILL.
The thing that jumps out at me is that they made videos of it. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised, I know this guy isn't the first person who did it, but I am. I video chat with my parents, I take pictures of myself and family and friends, but I can't remember the last time I said to myself "This is stupid, self-destructive, illegal, and embarrassing. I should create some irrefutable evidence of it!"
It doesn't explain it for this guy given that he's old, but filming everything is a reflex for kids-these-days -- I can see just not separating out 'things that I really should keep secret.' Possibly he picked up the habit from his youthful companions?
Sort of like "is you taking notes of a criminal fuckin' conspiracy?"
I can't remember the last time I said to myself "This is stupid, self-destructive, illegal, and embarrassing. I should create some irrefutable evidence of it!"
This is not a generational thing but has pretty much been happening since the advent of photography. (Someone here mentioned Maquis fighters taking group photos of themselves.)
Probabilities have shifted? Not that no one ever lost track of whether it was a bad idea to create photographic records of wrongdoing before the present, but the odds of there being photographic records of everything have gone up so much that the odds of this kind of mistake have gone up with them.
I think it's just gotten easier for the photo to spread.
Maybe the risk was part of the thrill. Or (non-exclusive with the previous) an assertion of invulnerability, not unfounded at the time given the friends he had and the stuff he made go away.
I was going to cite the Rob Ford video, but it looks like that was surreptitious.
Yes to 27, 28. I'm sure thousands of soldiers came back from the war with photos of them doing things that were stupid, illegal and anything from embarrassing to horrific, but the Greatest Generation didn't have YouTube, so no one's seen the photo of grandad in Burma with that Jap skull wired to the front of his jeep except his horrified daughter when she was clearing out the attic, and she chucked it away.
The skull, of course, is also in the attic. She mailed that with no return address to general delivery at the Tokyo post office with a request that it be respectfully buried and an apology about the painting of Betty Grable on the side.
Moby clearly has some expertise in this area.
No. Just read the stories. My dad was too young, my uncles were pilots, and my great uncles were in Europe.
"My grandfather killed four Germans with his bare hands in Normandy. It was in 1965. He got into terrible trouble."
European people also have skulls.
I haven't looked in the medical literature to confirm that.
Actually, my great uncle, is still living. He was being trained to serve as an infantry man in the Pacific and, when the Italian front started to look less like a soft underbelly and more like a very long assault on well-defended mountains, they pulled him out and sent him to Europe because he spoke Italian and they needed translators.
Shouldn't have bothered. Italians don't even speak Sicilian.
Apparently Sicilian curse words are widely understood.
Actually, my great uncle,
Your great uncle invented mansplaining??
Great uncle Matthew's entrenching tool is relevant here
Great uncle Matthew's entrenching tool is relevant here
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/21/media-war-trump-destined-fail
44:
Paragraph 2: "The people of the respectable east coast press..."
Paragraph 3: "A recent Alternet article I read..."
It seems like you are picking nits since para three also referenced the WaPo.
and the alternet piece referred to was a compilation of other sources.
I agree it referenced plenty of conventional media, but Alternet was the first concrete example cited, and at the start of the paragraph; it was a bit of a jarring Graeber/laptops moment for me.
Does the part of the media that has a paper at every supermarket check-out in America with the headline "Hillary set up Trump's son with emails" count as part of the bubble or not?
The press has problems, but the main one is a several decade war on any press that isn't right wing. I don't know how to stop it, but I'm pretty sure that average NYT reporter is in far less of a bubble than the average person who gets 90% or more of their news from Fox.
I don't think that the right wing war on the press should be underestimated, but if the press had been more sceptical about the Iraq war or even if they had rewarded the ones that were, after it became clear the war was a blunder, then I think journalists wouldn't be facing so much distrust from so many people.
I don't think there are enough of those people. Unless I'm in a bubble that is too far to the right, I'm very certain nobody ever lost a U.S. election over "we shouldn't have killed those foreign, non-white, not Christian people."
You might be right there, but even those people care about the humiliation of losing. My conservative friends here expected Iraq to become our little buddy. They didn't like it when that didn't happen.
They blame Obama and Democrats for that.
54- I think people who actually bought that absurd piece of spin are rarer than leftists.
It's a majority of the Republican party that blames Obama.
44: Thomas Frank is absurd. He acknowledges that the media is reporting accurately about Trump, but objects to this because ... reasons.
51, 53: The media finally did figure out that the war was a fraud, but that decreased the credibility of the media in the eyes of the Trump voters, who preferred the lies and continue to do so. Trump voters were shamed by defeat, sure, but their response was to double down on unreality -- demanding and getting a less responsible press and making an absurd con man president in order to avoid facing their own shame.
The more shame the rightwingers bring upon themselves, the more they demand denial and look for messengers to shoot.
For a significant majority of Trump voters, his impending humiliation will be reason to become even more radicalized, and Thomas Frank will explain that the smug liberals who were right all along are nonetheless to blame.
Frank is an idiot. He cites the failure of the media to spot the Internet bubble when:
1. That's just wrong. The existence of the bubble was well-documented in the media before it burst and
2. The cheerleaders for stocks in 1999 are, by and large, the same people who were cheerleaders for the Iraq War and the housing bubble and Donald Trump. The Trump portion of the electorate has always loved bullshit media and has always fought honest reporting.
It's the liberals who bitch about inaccuracy in reporting; the rightwingers complain about liberalism in the media. On the issues that Frank cites, to the extent that Republicans care about the truth at all, they are opposed to it.
57-1 Thomas Frank:"I believe that the news media needs to win its war with Trump, and urgently so."
He wishes they'd be more effective than they are. You don't?
57-4 This is the paragraph you are talking about: "This is one of the factors that explains the many monstrous journalism failures of the last few decades: the dot-com bubble, which was actively cheered on by the business press; the Iraq war, which was abetted by journalism's greatest sages; the almost complete failure to notice the epidemic of professional misconduct that made possible the 2008 financial crisis and the rise of Donald Trump, which (despite the media's morbid fascination with the man) caught nearly everyone flatfooted.
Everything they do, they do as a herd - even when it's running headlong over a cliff."
In all of those cases there were some people doing good work. If you knew where to look you could find the straight dope. Most people were getting fed straight bullshit by sources they thought they could trust though. He did say "nearly everyone." I don't think it is fair to call him an idiot for noticing that most of the journalism being produced takes a fairly consistent editorial slant.
The late 90s were great. You could just drop out of graduate school and two weeks later be working a job with great benefits and enough salary to buy a house.
57-2 end. I hope you are right about his (Trump's humiliation, but lets not count our chickens before they hatch.
sources they thought they could trust
I don't get how anyone who lived through Whitewater can say this about the NYT. Or, for that matter, the 2000 election campaign, and denouement.
I'm a lot less optimistic about Trump's humiliation than some.
62- I'm not sure I take your meaning. Whitewater did teach me to take newspapers a lot less seriously. A few moments thought should tell anyone not to trust the financial press, but lots of people, maybe even most tend(ed) to trust the MSM. I feel like the malfeasance of the press was a lot more subtle in the 2000 election than it has been with the Iraq war or the 2008 financial crisis.